In his essay on Philip Roth’s body of work (“Roth v. Roth v. Roth,” April), Joseph O’Neill noted: “Roth, though evidently blessed with decent health, has not enjoyed immunity from life’s distressing hazards, which in his case include a ‘crack-up’ in his mid-50s.”

There is an unfortunate biographical error in Joseph O’Neill’s essay about my work. He writes of my having “a crack-up.” The statement is not true, nor is there reliable biographical evidence to support it.

After knee surgery in March 1987, when I was 54, I was prescribed the sleeping pill Halcion, a sedative hypnotic in the benzodiazepine class of medications that can induce a debilitating cluster of adverse effects, sometimes called “Halcion madness.” At the time it was prescribed post-operatively for me by the orthopedic surgeon, Halcion had already been taken off the market in Holland, Germany, and elsewhere because of extreme psychological side effects leading even to suicide.

My own adverse reaction to Halcion, which corresponded to a clinically well-defined adverse reaction, one that has been exhaustively documented in the medical literature, started when I began taking the drug and resolved promptly when, with the helpful intervention of my family doctor, I stopped.

In a front-page story in The New York Times in January 1992, under the headline “Maker of Sleeping Pill Hid Data on Side Effects,” Halcion was characterized as “more dangerous than other sleeping pills and”—as I had discovered during the three months that I unsuspectingly took the drug—“more likely to cause symptoms like amnesia, paranoia, depression and hallucinations.”

Philip RothNew York, N.Y.

HERO OR VILLAIN?

In April, Roger Lowenstein wrote about how widespread and vitriolic the criticism of Ben Bernanke has been, even though he saved the global economy—a point illustrated by the conflicting headlines on the article (“The Villain”) and on the magazine’s cover (“The Hero”).

Bernanke isn’t a villain; he’s not a hero. He’s just a guy trying to do a complicated, high-pressure job the best he can, making plenty of mistakes along the way. The Fed is attracting lots of criticism from both sides because it’s trying to play things down the middle … The Fed is the only major Washington institution that seems to be doing anything other than jockeying for position in the November elections. It’s actually trying to do something, with no help from the other major players.

Bernanke may or may not have saved the global economy. However, one can see reasons to doubt he is a hero, without signing up for Rick Perry’s lynch party. When Bernanke became the Federal Reserve chairman in 2006, Alan Greenspan and Fannie/Freddie had already lined up the dominoes for the housing crash and financial crisis of 2008. I won’t second-guess Bernanke’s immediate actions in response to those events, taken under incredible pressure.

But we are now six years into the Bernanke era. We have learned that quantitative easing is Ph.D.-speak for “currency devaluation.” How you feel about that depends on which side of the game you are playing. If you are a retiree with a defined-benefit pension, or a saver with dollar-denominated assets, you don’t feel good. If you are a debtor with dollar-denominated obligations, you feel great. And who is the biggest debtor of all? The U.S. government. In 2011, the Fed purchased 60 percent of new Treasury issuance, while private and foreign purchases shrank. Bernanke’s policies have increased the federal deficit by propping up the market for Treasury debt.

Instead of an independent Federal Reserve Bank, we now have a central bank that operates like a branch of Treasury. To be a hero, Bernanke would need to restore the Fed’s independence, unwind its $1.6 trillion position in Treasury debt, and stabilize the dollar. If he did those things, he could be reappointed by a Republican president.

Steven TeeterCampbell, Calif.

I think vilification of Bernanke by the right is based not on perceived harm to the U.S., but on unwanted benefit to Obama. Vilification by the left, I don’t understand.

David MarkowitzStorrs, Conn.

The big end of finance, having won decisively in the global financial crisis, is in the process of rewriting history to suit its liking. The cover story in the current Atlantic… is a classic example of this type of revisionist history.

The grim reality is that future generations will face escalating commodity prices and falling real incomes due to rising environmental and resource costs, especially energy. The solution is obvious: intensive government investment to prepare for a declining fossil-fuel economy, financed by high taxes or restrictions on the most affluent and on luxuries. You could have it all—productive work for everyone and a vast reduction in wasteful consumption. Of course the political resistance will be fierce from wealthy special interests, yet the opposition to plutocratic greed is growing.

The Fed could buy government bonds at zero percent interest to help jump-start public investment, while raising interest rates for private finance and refusing to participate in more Wall Street bailouts.

Dick Burkhart Seattle, Wash.

Lowenstein writes, “In the time of Nicholas Biddle, and even during the formative years of the Fed, banknotes, being liabilities, could be redeemed for something of value, usually gold. Now our dollars are exchangeable only for more dollars.”

This perpetuates a falsehood. The monetary value of any commodity is arbitrary. Gold has no more intrinsic worth than a pocketful of any sort of paper, except for its ability to be forged into something useful or decorative, and even those artifacts are worth only what someone is willing to pay for them. At this moment, in this country, an ounce of gold is worth a great big pile of dollars just because we have agreed that it is. When I was a child it was worth $35. Tomorrow it could be worth nothing; all we have to do is change our minds.

The invention of fiat currency was certainly based to some extent on understanding this, plus the fact that by concentrating upon this agreement itself, instead of upon some fictitious “real” value, the currency gains the ability to expand or contract as it needs to without any reference to such a base. Fiat currency has become as important to modern economics as Darwin’s work is to modern biology, or Einstein’s to modern physics. In practice, it runs into trouble only when the underlying agreement is stressed beyond its comfort zone and the currency becomes either overvalued (as in a recession) or undervalued (inflation). However, I think we can agree that reestablishing confidence in a currency, however difficult, is always easier than increasing the amount of gold on hand.

William D. Owen Pasadena, Calif.

Whatever your opinion of Bernanke, your opinion of The Atlantic should decline after reading this puff piece.

ThagSimmonsTheAtlantic.com comment

DEBT AND DEMOGRAPHICS

In her April column (“Europe’s Real Crisis”), Megan McArdle outlined how achieving economic growth will be tough, because no European country has a fertility rate high enough to replace its current population.

Megan McArdle clearly lays out demographics as one reason that economic growth is unsustainable. She then drops the ball magnificently when she asks, “Is strong growth still possible once the demographic dividend has been paid out?” Rather than run with the hard truth, she cops out with an unsubstantiated “Of course it is, at least in theory.”

Perpetual “strong” economic growth is not possible, not even in theory, unless you perform the contortionist groupthink of the policy makers who have brought us the current mess. Continual growth relies on a growing population, as Ms. McArdle adroitly explains. But it also depends on unlimited and cheap resources, free waste disposal into our air and water, relentlessly longer hours at work (paid or unpaid) at the expense of leisure time, and ever greater waste. Inefficient and obsolescent products drive growth, as do canny marketers who persuade people to borrow money to buy ever more unnecessary crap. Continued growth depends on borrowing, both as formal loans, and through a plethora of investment and bond mechanisms. Most individuals, businesses, and governments within mature economies are now growing only thanks to borrowed money.

To an ecologist like myself, trained to understand what brings stability to ecosystems, it is apparent the model of continued growth in economic systems is inherently unstable. What we are seeing in southern Europe, in the U.S. recession, and in cycles of banking and market failures of increasing severity and frequency are the unavoidable consequences of a system chasing the myth of perpetual growth. Until the global economy can more closely mimic a steady-state system similar to a stable ecosystem, the world will continue to see more problems as described by Ms. McArdle.

Andrew L. Mack, Ph.D. New Florence, Pa.

Megan McArdle replies:

Whether or not continuous economic growth is possible, or desirable, the fact remains that modern economies are predicated on the assumption that it will happen. Both individuals and governments have planned for a future in which incomes steadily rise, allowing people to enjoy lengthy retirements, advanced health care, independent living, and of course, repayment of the massive debts that almost everyone has accumulated over the past few decades.

If that growth doesn’t materialize, the shock will be enormous. Generational battles over things like pensions have occurred in the context of rising incomes; they will become bitter indeed if young and old are fighting over a shrinking economic pie. The most brutal shock will of course be over debt. If incomes fall, debt will become an ever larger burden. But if countries default, they will merely shift the shock to someone else—too often, to pensioners at home or abroad.

However laudable Europe’s demographic decline may be from an environmental point of view, it will be an economic disaster for many who expected a stable, prosperous future.

And Furthermore …

The notion that “heavy debt and a shrinking population are a very bad combination” led to a discussion about immigration among online readers and the author (“McMegan”).

The obvious answer is for European countries (and Japan) to greatly increase their immigration, especially of young people. A huge number of people would love to become new citizens, so demand isn’t the problem. Of course, it simply delays the long-term problem. But having a delay should be enough to help solve the problem. Pensions should be lower, because future growth is probably going to be lower. But pension systems like Social Security should provide enough for a person to live, even if they don’t provide enough to live well. If you want to live well, then you will need to save a lot more money.

rossbTheAtlantic.com comment

It depends on the kind of immigration you are exposed to. If you are far from the borders of a particular country, immigrants from that country tend to be well educated and ambitious. In Ireland, generally speaking, you are not getting the beggars from Pakistan, you are getting the doctors, and they come into your country speaking English and emphasizing education to their children. Of course this helps an economy.

However, if you are very close to a country with a porous border and a ridiculous immigration policy, you get large numbers of desperate, mainly uneducated workers. Many such people don’t speak the native language and therefore have a very hard time helping their children in school. Furthermore, they, as families, often have a survival mentality rather than an education mentality, and since the parents have little education, both have to work long hours to provide for their families. This further impedes their children’s ability to perform well academically and take advantage of opportunities in their new country. The result is several generations of poverty and lack of education (and hence lack of productivity), which can be made up only partially by working very long hours at menial tasks. This is not the ideal situation for long-term growth.

Loader2000TheAtlantic.com comment

There are legitimate questions about how many people a country can assimilate into the cultural and economic framework that supports its economy. I think the answer is “more than anyone is currently importing,” but a 50 percent replacement rate probably strains that pretty badly. And the few societies which are that dependent on guest workers are not, mostly, attractive places.

McMeganTheAtlantic.com comment

I think it is not so simple as how many you can import at any given time. It is a complex function which also varies with how many you can assimilate at any given time, including how much and how fast their children assimilate (or are allowed to assimilate, which is the same problem).

QuiteExasperatedTheAtlantic.com comment

We Americans completely fail to appreciate the cultural and racial homogeneity that defines virtually every other extant nation-state. We think that everywhere else can and should be an American melting pot.

Anyone who has spent more than a few days in Japan (for example) should know that the introduction of a significant immigrant population would turn that nation into something that is no longer Japan. Indeed, it would likely destroy the nation.

What do you do with a 1,200-pound animal when you can’t afford the feed, the range is overgrazed, and euthanasia is beyond your means? No one breeds a mare with the intention of sending the foal to slaughter, should it become “excess inventory.” But banning slaughter in the U.S. doesn’t stop it. And we can’t do anything about conditions in Mexico. Let’s regulate horse slaughter here, where we have a say in the matter.

AudreyATheAtlantic.com comment

Slaughter is not a humane option for combatting equine abuse and neglect—these would cease with responsible horse breeding and ownership. When California passed a strict anti–horse slaughter law in 1998, there was no increase in horse neglect and abuse cases, but there was a drop in horse theft. Being killed in a slaughterhouse in the U.S. might be marginally preferable to being killed in a slaughterhouse in Mexico or Canada, but from a horse’s perspective, it is all pretty much the same horror show. It is time for the “agrarian holdouts” who raise horses for profit to stop. For now, in this economy, the days of making money by breeding horses are over. To compound that mistake by bringing back the inhumane practice of slaughter lacks all integrity.

Larew TheAtlantic.com comment

Darcy Courteau replies:

I’m heartened to see so many champion the horse. All animals deserve better ends than they’ll find in most slaughterhouses—so far, my parents have been able to put down aged equines themselves, and over the years they informally adopted several unwanted animals, until recent circumstances made this impossible. My sketch of a country auction was no ringing endorsement of industrial slaughter, but instead described the plight of horse owners facing difficult times. Like the de facto slaughter ban, whose unhappy consequences have been thoroughly documented by the Government Accountability Office, having horse people give up the life they know is a seductively simple but flawed solution.

We can do better by horses—responsible breeding is the first place to start—but let it be said that the horse owners I’ve known work around the clock to keep their stock fed. Whether urbanites and hobbyists like it or not, in some American enclaves, people and horses still share a fragile interdependence. Efforts to improve the lives of one group will have to address the needs of the other.

CORRECTIONS

In “Night Owls” (April), Bernard Freyberg’s last name was misspelled. “The Royal Me” (April) stated that Western Australia first tried to secede from Australia in the late 1820s; however, the Australian colonies did not federate until 1901.

Most Popular

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.